What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the devel...opment of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literature is totally lacking in any working method to enable it... to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a small thing indeed, but it makes for a notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

There is a tendency to discuss surrealism and cubism as if one proceeds out of the other, but in fact there is no similarity. Cubi...sm was a way of painting that a group of painters imposed on themselves, surrealism a philosophy of life put forward by a band of poets. The first was essentially a method of breaking up the object and putting it together again according to concepts of pictorial structure, a phase of the greatest importance in the development of such painters as Picasso, Braque, Marcoussis, and Gris, but affecting literature only through Apollinaire, and life hardly at all. The second was the attempt of a highly organized group to change life altogether, to make a new kind of man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The human face is the organic seat of beauty.... It is the register of value in development, a record of Experience, whose legitim...ate office is to perfect the life, a legible language to those who will study it, of the majestic mistress, the soul.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

There is yet another kind of matrimonial dialect (which naturally succeeds this of talking at each other), which may very properly... be styled The Language Contradictory.... In the former, however plain the object of satire may be exhibited to the whole company, yet there always remains some little covering.... But in this last method, the defiance becomes more open and the impetuosity with which these contradictions are uttered (although the subjects of them are often of the most indifferent nature) evidently prove that they arise from passion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

At each stage of development the child needs different resources from the family. During the first year, a variety of experience a...nd the availability of the parents for attachment are primary. During the second and third years, stimulation of language development is critical. During the years prior to school entrance, information that persuades children they are loved becomes critical, and during the school years it is important for children to believe that they can succeed at the tasks they want to master.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

One of your biggest jobs as a parent of multiples is no bigger than simply talking to your children individually and requiring tha...t they respond to you individually as well. The benefits of this kind of communication can be enormous, in terms of the relationship you develop with each child, in terms of their language development, and eventually in terms of their sense of individuality, too.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Critics of visual arts and of music describe in words--that is to say, a system of signs other than those made by brushes on canva...s or chisels into stone or notes of music--those characteristics of painting or sculpture or music which can be described or analysed. Visual artists and composers can disregard critics on the ground that the medium of verbal criticism bears so indirect a relation to the medium in which they make something. Poets are in a different situation. With the development of so-called scientific methods of criticism they are made ever conscious that criticism of poetry is in the same medium of work as the art which they practise. "Close analysis" is useful to critics and readers. But for the poet there is the danger of disintegration of poetry into paraphrase, examination of technique, influences, all analysed in the language of criticism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The novelist sets forth his characters in two ways, by direct comment upon them, or indirectly by reporting their actions and beha...vior and letting the report speak for itself. The portraitist uses the latter method only, translating everything into purely visual and self-sufficient terms. His problem is to fuse into a single unambiguous statement what he sees of a man and what he understands of him. The greater his selective faculty and power of communication the keener will be his portrait. Facial expressions and body gestures are a living language which we all have learned to read as a clue to, and use as a revelation, of character. A keen portraitist has a flair for this wordless language of the face, and simply by reporting the visible quantity of the body-soul equation he can give us insight into the hidden psychological quality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »